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We'll run out of oil in 50 years.

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While we're talking cubic miles here, consider this: World consumption of oil is about 30 billion barrels per year. One barrel of oil is 42 gallons, and 7.48 gallons will fill one cubic foot. So if you work it out, we use slightly over a cubic mile of oil a year.

One estimate puts the initial total at about 2200 billion barrels of crude oil on Earth, of which, depending upon who's estimate you believe, we've used about 45% to 70% so far.

The Energy Resources Program of the United States Geological Survey produces the official estimates of the world oil resources for the U.S. Federal Government. They estimate that the remaining world oil reserves at about 1,000 billion barrels. Current estimates place the exhaustion of the remaining known reserves within the next 50 years.

It sure would be nice if we'd face that reality and make an international commitment to doing something about it. Actually, facing long term realities seems to be a significant human inability. Is that because the most influential world cultures are based around belief systems that actively ignore and even suppress reality?

Comments

Anonymous said…

Oil is made by bacteria, not dinosaurs. In the 1980's we had found enough oil for it to take 15,000 years to use just 2% of it (counting for population growth and extra use by countries like China). Since then we have discovered several OCEAN sized deposits. Lies are told to keep prices artificially high. Do your research.

We cannot possibly run out of oil on this planet, no matter how hard we tried, any more than we could drink all the water.

start here if you like:http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090910084259.htm

Most oil just can't be processed. 90% of oil is too deep to locate. About 75% of the known oil is unsafe to harvest. And of the 2.5% left, 97% of it is shale oil. Which (though we can process it) is expensive.

Eventually technology will increase sufficiently to allow us to gather these sources. The problem comes with the fact that the consumption of that much oil would release so much green house gass so as to turn our planet into Venus.

Even if you don't believe in global warming, we would suffocate and eventually be crushed by the atmosphereic pressure.

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